The Internet has become a major channel for companies to conduct business. A wide range of business transactions including business to business, business to consumers, auctions, reverse auctions and vertical networks of businesses have driven growth.
The unique aspects of this digital connectivity has spurred new forms of commerce transactions, eliminated geographic and time zone constraints, placed suppliers and customers in direct contact and essentially transformed the landscape of commerce. The speed of this transformation and the radical impact this has had on company fortunes has pushed businesses to rapidly reorganize and re-engineer themselves, internally and externally with customers/suppliers. This, in turn, has placed new requirements on IT departments.
Incorporating the web as a legitimate business channel has been a real struggle for most companies. Businesses have had to balance the pressures to ‘get on the net’ quickly against a long list of issues, including: determining what part of the company should get on the net first, evaluating how this should happen, developing an overall strategy for getting the entire company on the net, designing websites, connecting to internal computer applications, collaborating internally and externally, training to eliminate significant ignorance of web technology and what the emerging business models really mean, and marketing with regard to brand implications.
The complexities of defining what and how business will be conducted at the company website along with the intricacies of implementing the website and the myriad connections to internal applications has made the entire application extremely difficult to manage.
A typical website implementation team consists of a few business domain experts but is largely dominated by web designers, content developers, database architects, middleware and other IT specialists. Given the large Web and IT focus on a typical e-commerce project, there is reduced emphasis on a clear definition of the business requirements that must be implemented, disconnects between what the website implements and the required business requirements and most importantly, the inability of the website to respond quickly to business changes. This has resulted in companies continuously changing business applications to accommodate changing external requirements and frustrated customers who do not understand the underlying business application and the critical connection between how the site must be used to get results.
There is a need for an efficient method for implementing web and other user interfaces based on clearly defined business rules and enable business objectives and business application capabilities to drive web and other user interface implementation. There is another need for a method and apparatus creating and updating software that eliminates the need for complex technical programming and maintenance. There is a further need for a method and apparatus for creating software that enables complex business rules easily.